At the top of the first flight of stairs was a bronze head of Stalin, and at the top of the second there was a bronze head of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Operation Barbarossa looked like it was going to be bad news for Russian sculptors, just like everyone else. The floor was covered with broken glass, and there was a line of bullet holes on the gray wall that led all the way along a wide corridor to a couple of open facing doors, through which more SS officers were passing to and fro in a haze of cigarette smoke. One of these was my unit’s commanding officer, SS-Standartenführer Mundt, who was one of those men who look like they came out of their mother’s womb wearing a uniform. Seeing me, he raised an eyebrow and then a hand as he casually acknowledged my salute.

“The murder squad,” he said. “Did you catch them?”

“Yes, Herr Oberst.”

“Good work. What did you do with them?”

“We shot them, sir.” I handed over a handful of Red identification documents I’d taken from the Russians before their executions.

Mundt started to look through the documents like an immigration officer searching for something suspicious. “Including the women?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pity. In future, all female partisans and NKVD are to be hanged in the town square, as an example to the others. Heydrich’s orders. Understand?”

“Yes, Herr Oberst.”

Mundt wasn’t much older than me. When the war broke out he’d been a police colonel with the Hamburg Schutzpolizei. He was clever, only his was the wrong kind of cleverness for Kripo: To be a decent detective you have to understand people, and to understand people you have to be one of them yourself. Mundt wasn’t like people. He wasn’t even a person. I supposed that was why he had a pet dachshund with him—so that it might make him seem a little more human. But I knew better. He was a cold, pompous bastard. Whenever he spoke he sounded like he thought he was reciting Rilke, and I wanted to yawn or laugh or kick his teeth in. Which is how it must have looked.

“You disagree, Hauptmann?”

“I don’t much care to hang women,” I said.

He looked down his fine nose and smiled. “Perhaps you’d prefer to do something else with them?”

“That must be someone else you’re thinking of, sir. What I mean is, I don’t much like waging war on women. I’m the conventional type. The Geneva Convention, in case you were wondering.”

Mundt pretended to look puzzled. “It’s a strange way of observing the Geneva Convention you have,” he said. “To shoot thirty prisoners.”